London’s NHS trusts are looking for new patient administration and electronic patient record systems (PAS/EPR), worth between £250 and £400 million over four years

St George’s Healthcare, an NHS Trust based in Tooting, South London, is leading the procurement. The tender is split into three lots: one to build, deploy and maintain the PAS/EPR systems themselves, another to provider a portal that allows clinicians and patients to access the systems, and a third to provide the hosting infrastructure.

The tender specificies that the portal should allow clinicians and patients to access healthcare records "without the need for them to access directly the Trust’s back-end solutions".

This is the latest in a string of patient records systems that have been tendered in recent weeks. The Northumbria NHS Trust published a contract notice for a similar system at the end of last week, while Morecambe Bay Trust sought a new electronic records system in early February.

An electronic patient records system for the whole NHS was one of the components of the troubled National Programme for IT. CSC, the IT services companies contracted to provide the system, confirmed last week that it expects to lose almost $1.5 billion that it had invested in the project following "scope modifications and contract value reductions".

CSC CEO Mike Laphan, who is to leave the company later this year, said that discussions with the UK government over Lorenzo "have evolved into a potential go-forward framework that is currently in the government’s review process".